ROBERT MILBY
BEETHOVEN
Alas, I understand you Beethoven.
I place my left ear close to the wax and blood stained parchment.
But I am wearing glasses; yet do not envy blind poets.
I rub my ear against the book—
Strike the tear-flooded table with my head—
I cannot tell where I shall wake or what the manuscript will look like
Once the coffee dries on the paper and the record ceases your sound.
I leap to my boots; the lantern gasps at grey phantoms flooding this dusty room,
over the casement where winter has sucked warm air into ice wood.
Great Sagittarius, you move through nine dimensions as when you lived.
I am not impressed by your lodge affiliation.
I’d heard enough about how the brothers bailed Amadeus out of trouble.
What of Countess Erdody?
Who is the Ghost of the trio?
The snows of the nearby woods in Moonlight recount your wrath.
Von Schiller’s springtime was your mythic past.
Your noble morality is a rustic dance!
If music is the mediator between worlds, you command the entities.
Your spiritual son attended your funeral, but died just one year later.
When I wander your string quartets, I walk the breezy Regency fields where my poetic ancestors strolled after an evening meal.
When I am besieged by your symphonies, my passions reflect the great tempests of the Atlantic whose twisted, amorous, wraiths beckon German ghosts from Bonn and Berlin.
I want to hear Razumovksy in Vienna!
I need to read Goethe in the Egmont!
I long for the explosions of the Ninth!
I seduced the woman of European sentience as she played your piano.
I brood in stark January, to the somber snows of the Seventh’s Allegretto.
Your Immortal Beloved propelled the trauma of your darkest passions.
At least you thought you’d had a son.
But for libations of a Fifth, you are the obstreperous Emperor!
Great one, I too have seized Fate by the throat—when Destiny stood at my door, pounding on the casket wood I emerge from each time I write—
garret resplendent with the raw force of your sublime melodies!